Ordinary Gweilo

It's not big and it's not clever, it's just a Brit in Hong Kong writing (mainly) about Hong Kong

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Month: Jan 2004

  • CNY blues

    I’ve just remembered something I don’t like about Chinese New Year. The KCR is jam-packed full of people, shopping centres have twice as many people as usual walking around aimlessly, and the traffic is so horrible that I have to wait 40 minutes for a shuttle bus to get home. As far as I could…

  • Distasteful II

    Yesterday’s Apple Daily has a large photograph on its front page of an elderly woman who was killed by a falling window. The photograph shows her lying in the street in a pool of blood, either dying or already dead. Her face has been pixellated, but her identity can hardly be a secret. I don’t…

  • Atkins Lite

    Having mentioned the Atkins diet on Saturday, I was watching a BBC documentary on TVB Pearl on Sunday night (“Fit for Life” I think it was called) where an overweight cab driver was trying the very same diet. I assume the reason he was featured was because his wife was a fitness instructor (and, yes,…

  • The wrong kind of chips

    This story from The Guardian made me laugh. An angry customer tried to return a computer complaining that the computer he had bought only hours before did not work, according to police reports. The store’s staff opened the machine and discovered it was not functioning because its working parts had been replaced with small potatoes.…

  • Red Envelopes

    The day after Christmas is known in some parts of the world (chiefly those with a strong British influence) as Boxing Day. A long time ago, servants and tradespeople used to be given a gift (or “Christmas box”) on Boxing Day by their employers or customers. When I was a child (in the UK) it…

  • What country are you?

    With thanks to Shaky for finding this: You’re Fiji! As calm, relaxed, and removed from life as they come, you’re just so chilled out, it hurts people to see you. Everyone aspires to be where you are, but most of them just can’t put their stress away. Little do they know that even you sometimes…

  • The Big Mac Index

    This week’s Economist has an updated “Big Mac Index”. This attempts to use the price of a Big Mac to determine whether currencies are valued correctly. It also gives you an idea where you might not want to go on holiday with children (assuming they like going to McDonalds). This summer we went on holiday…

  • ESF appoints insider to top job

    The English Schools Foundation (ESF) has chosen a new chief executive. His name is Mike Haynes and he is the chairman of the Parent-Teacher Association at West Island School (details here) and an ESF executive committee member, but other than that he appears to have no previous experience in the education sector. The story is…

  • Alternatives to Atkins

    There’s an interesting letter in this week’s Spike magazine, responding to an article a few weeks back by Ross Edwards Marks extolling the virtues of the Atkins Diet. I have watched in amazement as the Atkins diet has become so popular and even respectable, even though it greatly restricts what you can eat and the…

  • The spam scam

    Is spam (junk e-mail) really a big problem? I have a Hotmail account which I almost never use. The main reason I stopped using it was that 99.9% of the messages were ‘spam’, to the tune of 20-30 per day. I briefly tried using Hotmail’s Junk Mail facility, but it limited the number of email…